The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon

I was not the prettiest bartender at the Coyote Ugly Saloon. In my opinion, that would have been Caroline. I was partial to Caroline, though, because she had been so nice to me when I began working here. She was very pretty and also very funny. When I asked Caroline how she'd gotten her first bartender job, she cupped her breasts and said simply, "These." (On first glance, however, Caroline's breasts didn't seem exceptional, and I said as much. She unzipped her bulky sweatshirt and showed them to me. Then I said, "Oh.")

Still, some regulars would have insisted that the prettiest bartender at the Coyote Ugly Saloon was Chris, who had sassy short hair like a boy's and a heart-stopping midriff. Of course, there was also Jackie to consider. Jackie was very pretty. Jackie was also famous for tossing shots of rum into her mouth, holding a lighter to her lips and blowing ten-foot bursts of flame across the room. There was definitely a cult of Jackie. Molly was pretty in a way that attracted the downtown crowd, and Dawn was pretty in the way that bikers like. And as for Jessie? Jessie was practically an objet d'art. Jessie was so goddamn pretty that it barely counted. One of the many regulars who fell in love with Jessie dated her a few times. She broke it off quickly. But he would still come into the Coyote Ugly Saloon every night, just to talk about her.

"Jessie was so beautiful," he would slur to some single woman drinking alone at the bar. "But she left me. She said I disgusted her. She told me she was repulsed by my touch."

After weeks of this, I finally said, "Listen, friend. You really need to work on a better pickup line. You really want to stop spreading that story around."

I gave a lot of good counsel at the Coyote Ugly Saloon. I certainly gave a lot of advice to men who'd fallen in love with their bartenders. It was a perennial problem. It was, after all, pretty much the whole point of the place.

When I was new at my bartending job, the owner of the Coyote Ugly Saloon told me, "If anyone ever comes into this place and asks for a mud slide, a zombie or a grasshopper, go ahead and make the drink. Then charge the guy fifteen bucks for it. Then take him outside and beat the shit out of him. Because this is not that kind of bar."

Truly, the Coyote Ugly Saloon is not for everyone. If you do not like a bar where all the songs on the jukebox are either by Hank Williams or about Hank Williams, then you will not like this bar. It is loud and dark and hidden down low in the East Village of New York City.

If you had come into the Coyote Ugly Saloon when I was bartending and asked me for a martini, I would have poured you a shot of Jack Daniel's, and I would have said, "That's how we make martinis in this place, pal." If you had come into the Coyote Ugly Saloon when Caroline was bartending and asked her for a rusty nail, she might have climbed on top of the bar and poured the Jack Daniel's down your throat for you.

Now if you had come into the Coyote Ugly Saloon when Lil was bartending and asked, say, for a glass of water, you would have really been in trouble. Lil would have turned off the jukebox immediately. Lil would have climbed on top of the bar and shouted to the crowd, "Do we drink water in this goddamn bar?" And the crowd would have booed and laughed. Then Lil would have poured some Jack Daniel's down the throats of all your friends. Then Lil would have poured some Jack Daniel's down her own throat, and then Lil would have charged you for buying her a drink.

Liliana Lovell was my boss. She owns the Coyote Ugly Saloon.

Lil is short, cute and tough. She has the body of a figure skater and the voice of a lifetime smoker. Lil is a legend in the neighborhood. She got her training across the street, at a bar called the Village Idiot, a dive that made the Coyote Ugly Saloon look like the Russian Tea Room. The Village Idiot was owned by this guy named Tom, who used to drink terrific amounts of Guinness and this piss behind his own jukebox. There were potholes in the floor of his bar deep enough to trip a horse. There was no drainage system, so the bartenders had to wade through shin-deep beer by the end of the night. When things started pressing in on them and the bartenders wanted to keep patrons back, they'd pour rum down the length of the bar and set it on fire. Tom hired only women bartenders at the Village Idiot. When Tom needed new help, he would put a sign outside reading, SHAMELESS SLUTS WANTED: NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY.

Lil mastered her trade at the Village Idiot. She worked hard over there at Tom's bar. She saved up her tips—one greasy dollar bill at a time—and bought the Coyote Ugly Saloon. She opened her business right across the street from the Village Idiot. She was just 25 years old, two years older than I was, when she hired me to work in her bar.

Lil could drink with her customers until they were all blind, and then she'd make men suck tequila from her boots (and sometimes, I'm sorry to report, from her socks) while maintaining complete control. Lil was always in charge. Men loved her, but their love was tempered with a healthy touch of fear.

My favorite story from the canon of Lil goes like this: One night Lil traveled all the way to the Upper East Side to play pool at a snobbish tavern. An affluent-looking young man in a suit and tie made the unwise comment that women shouldn't be allowed to play pool, since they only got in the way of men. So Lil challenged the fellow and his friends to a game of pool. She ended up beating them three times in a row.

Humiliated, the young man claimed, "You're winning only because we've been drinking and you haven't."

Here he made his mistake.

"How many rounds of drinks have you had?" Lil asked.

"Four," the man said.

So Lil ordered herself five shots of Wild Turkey. She slammed the shots down, one after the other. Then Lil beat those little pricks once more just to teach them some manners.

Anyhow, that was my boss. I was afraid of her. I wanted to be her. I'd never been behind a bar before I came to work at the Coyote Ugly Saloon. Lil trained me herself. She didn't overload me with information at first. She didn't try to teach me how to mix drinks or even how to use the cash register. Basically I just followed her around and tried to absorb everything I could. I was obviously clueless. Not only could I not tend bar but I'd also shown up on my first night ridiculously dressed in tidy slacks and a buttondown charcoal gray wool sweater. During that first shift, my new boss gave me just two specific instructions about bartending. One: "Get those drinks out, and get them fast." Two: "Don't wear so much next time."

Lil hired and fired many bartenders in her constant search for the perfect Coyote Ugly Saloon staff. Of course, she hired only women. Since most bar patrons were men, this was a great gimmick. I'll never understand why it's not a more common practice.

It was not always obvious what Lil was looking for in her women or why she was dissatisfied with those she discarded. She was ruthless. She gave no explanations. There were many bartenders at the Coyote Ugly Saloon whose careers lasted a single night. This could be perplexing. Many of the women that Lil fired were not only attractive but also perfectly competent bartenders. (Better than me, for instance, since they may have had previous experience at real bars, where one would be expected to know how to make a woo-woo, a mud slide or a grasshopper.) But there could be one thing about the girl that Lil didn't like, and that would be it—out the swingin' door.

There were bartenders who seemed to get fired because they were too fragile or too shy or too polite, of all things. (Early in my own Coyote Ugly Saloon career, I made the mistake of saying to a customer, "Here's your beer, sir." Lil overheard and shouted, "Don't even call anyone in this place 'sir'!" So I said, "I'm terribly sorry. I meant to say, 'Here's your beer, douche bag.'" Lil and the customer laughed. And I though, Oh, I get it, but I am a very quick study.) Some bartenders were gorgeous but not sexy, so what's the point? Some bartenders laughed a lot but were not funny themselves, so that didn't work, either.

It all sounds ridiculously capricious, but Lil had a good eye. And what did she look for in us? Ultimately, Lil loved us only if you loved us. Because if you come to a bar called the Coyote Ugly Saloon and you order a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and a shot of Old Weller, then you are seeking a very specific experience. You are probably looking for a bar something like the bar I visited once in Corona, New Mexico, with the sign on the door that read, PLEASE LEAVE ALL GUNS AND KNIVES IN YOUR CAR. THANK YOU KINDLY.

I myself was saved by Redneck Lou. Redneck Lou—the huge tattooed South Carolinian collector of Confederate-flag belt buckles—was one of Lil's best friends and the bar's consummate regular. He owned a denim jacket with an American flag on the back and a slogan underneath that read, TRY BURNING THIS ONE, ASSHOLE. Redneck Lou came into the bar during one of my early shifts, and we sang a Johnny Cash song together. I told him it was my favorite. Well it was Redneck Lou's favorite, too. He reported later to Lil, "I love that new bartender." That was it. I was in.

But I was never really sure how long I could stay in. As a Coyote Ugly Saloon bartender, I was to lure people into that place, keep them there as long as I could and make damn sure they came back the next week. Our jobs depended upon this, and Lil never let her bartenders forget that.

No excuses were accepted. It didn't matter if it was a Sunday night or the weather was miserable or the New York Giants were in the Super Bowl. The bartender was responsible for bringing customers in. Period. Lil could do it. Lil could get crowds in that bar, and they'd never leave. If they started thinking about leaving, she would start feeding them free shots. She would press them to put their favorite songs on the jukebox. She would mercilessly tease them in front of their friends for being wimps. Whatever it took. Lil was expert at making patrons realize that while they may have needed to leave the bar, they didn't actually want to. People who thought they were on their way out found themselves, instead, suddenly buying a round for the whole bar.

Lil could pack that place during a Christmas-night blizzard and she believed that any decent Coyote Ugly bartender should be able to do the same. That was only fair. She could also out-drink every single customer in the crowd. She believed any decent Coyote Ugly bartender should be able to do that too.

I was pretty good at filling the bar, but I couldn't drink on Lil's level. I could not toss back Kentucky bourbon for eight consecutive hours and still articulate English. Much less count change. So I invented a little trick (made public here for the first time) to save my life. I would pour a shot for the customer. I would pour a shot for myself. I kept a mug of Coke beside me at all times. The customer would swig, and I would swig. But I would not swallow. I would pretend to chase my shot with a slug of Coke, and then I would secretly spit the shot back into the Coke. Nobody ever knew.

OK, some people knew. Bud Lite Lou knew. Bud Lite Lou was one of the few Coyote regulars sober enough to notice my ruse. Which he found amusing. He would beg me to sell him the mug full of whiskey, spit and Coke at the end of the night. "I'll give you five bucks for it," he'd say.

But it didn't matter whether it was actual drinking or just the appearance of drinking. It honestly didn't matter. We were expected to be a little bit larger than life, or to pretend to be, or—at the very least—to want to be. We were the good-time girls. We were a cross between Old West dancehall hookers and gangsters' gun molls. Crack that gum, swing that ass, drink that shot, keep that change. If I didn't know you, I called you Mack, Jack, Slim, Dutch, Duke, Pal or Buddy. You talked trash to me; I talked it right back, but faster. Anything you needed, I set you up. You brought your friends in, I treated 'em right. You gave me trouble, I'd tell ya to scram. It was the 1990s, but talking like Mae West always helped.

There are so many secrets to getting a man to fall in love with his bartender, and so few of them have to do with mixing good drinks. At the very simplest level, the game goes like this: One afternoon you visit a bar. I am your bartender. You have two bottles of Miller, and you tell me about your upcoming divorce. I sympathize. I tell you a few lawyer jokes ("How do you keep a lawyer from drowning? Take your foot off his head"), and that cheers you up a bit. Three weeks later, you come into the bar again. This time you've brought your drinking buddies. As you enter, I say something like, "Hide your girlfriends—it's Jerry!" Then I say to your friends, "You know this maniac?" I open up a nice, cold bottle of Miller just for you, before you even sit down. Your friends are beginning to think that you are very notorious individual indeed. You may even be wondering if I've mistaken you for some other Jerry. But you like the attention, so we continue the banter until your friends finally get up to play darts.

Then I lean over the bar, and I say very quietly, very gently, "How'd the court date go, Jer?"

You, Jerry, are now in love with me.

Or I could cut out the sympathetic-ear routine and just be a quick wit. There are men who love that too. If you were sitting at the bar when I cut into somebody else—somebody who really had it coming—you might fall in love with me just for that.

There was a man who used to come into the bar and regularly hassle me. He liked to say that I was too good for the place and managed to make this statement seem incredibly insulting. He had fun trying to guess what I really wanted to be in life or what career I had failed at so miserably that I was "only" a bartender. His name was Johnny.

"What are you doing working behind a bar, anyhow?" Johnny shouted.

"I like it here," I said. "I like being around sweethearts like you."

"I bet you want to be a movie star in real life."

"I want to be a scientist," I lied.

"A scientist?" Johnny repeated. He winked and said, "Maybe you should do some experiments with me, baby."

And then I said, "Looks like somebody already did, pal."

See how it works? My lines didn't have to be perfect. They just had to be quick. The regulars loved little scenes like this. They'd cheer me on. On another night, a well-dressed man walked into Coyote. He took a seat. He asked me, "What's up?"

I replied, "It's a preposition."

The regulars laughed. The well-dressed man shouted, "You're funny! I love you! If I had a car service pick us up right now and take us to JFK, would you go away with me tonight?"

"Nope," I said.

"Name your favorite city, anywhere in the world. I'll take you there right now."

"Minsk," I said.

"You're a riot!" he shouted. "I love you! At least let me take you out for dinner."

"Nope," I said.

Then the well-dressed man climbed up onto the bar. He knelt in beer puddles. He shouted, "I love this woman! I am publicly humiliating myself for her! Come to dinner with me!"

"Nope," I said.

"Look at that!" he shouted to the other customers. "She's hilarious! I love her!"

"If you stuck a knife into that guy right now," one of my regulars told me, "I'd deny that I ever saw a thing."

And all the other regulars laughed.

I had regulars who would come in and apologize to me for having missed my earlier shifts that week. Such a regular might say, "Remember me? You told me to come back and see you on Tuesday? I honestly meant to, but an emergency came up with my family. I'm so sorry. It won't happen again."

I had a lonely regular who used to say, "My cat keeps asking me when I'm finally going to bring you home to meet him. He's tired of me talking about you all the time."

I still have a lovely note that a very young regular gave me at the end of one shift. It reads, "If you can be so sweet and give me a call if you are not busy? To go out to dinner or to dancing, both!" The note is signed, "My name is Luis." A pin is attached that says, PUERTO RICO.

There was a time, when I was a novice Coyote Ugly Saloon bartender, when I measured a good night by the number of marriage proposals I had received. I had a particularly determined regular who would ask me to marry him literally every time I walked past. For hours on end, we'd have this same conversation.

"Will you marry me, Liz?"

"Nope."

"OK," he'd say.

Then the next bartender would arrive for the second shift.

"Will you marry me, Molly?" he'd ask.

I began regarding the words "Will you marry me?" as one of those phrases like "You got a staring problem, asshole?" or "I want to sing a song" or "I used to be a hell of a good looking guy!"

It was obviously one of those things men say only when they are really, really drunk.

It is a great thing to be a much loved bartender. It is a great thing to be a celebrity, even within a community of bors. I found all that drunken love to be completely narcotic. A British friend came to New York to visit, and he watched me tend bar for hours. He said, "They all adore you. And they're all so miserable and pathetic. You, my dear, are the Queen of the Gutter!"

Fuck it, I love that title. I loved that gutter.

I loved "Many Faces of Eve" Janet, who was an attractive schizophrenic woman from the neighborhood. I would let Janet drink until she had a mood swing and started spitting at people, and then I would ask her to leave. Sometimes she left violently, but not always. "I'll tell you something, Missy," Janet once said with great dignity as she was exiting. "If I had known how difficult you were going to be to manage, I never would have accepted the job of being your guardian angel."

I loved Little Vinnie. Little Vinnie was an old man who showed up in the early afternoons. He drank White Russians with a straw as if he were drinking milk shakes at a soda shop. Little Vinnie was Ashley the Junkie's boyfriend (or perhaps her pimp). Ashley was not old, but she was worn and scrawny. She used to fall asleep at the bar and knock over her Long Island iced teas. (A Long Island iced tea is a wonder to make: Pour equal measures of all clear liquors—vodka, gin, rum, tequila, triple sec—into a pint glass over ice. Add a splash of Coke. Serve. Ashley the Junkie could drink four of these gravediggers in an hour.)

I loved Ashley, and she loved me. She had a fantasy that someday the two of us would visit Great Adventure Theme Park together.

"We'll go in a convertible," she'd say. "We'll sure get the guys, won't we? I mean, look at us—blonde, thin…"

Here she would trail off. Here Ashley Junkie would run out of similarities between us.

"That sounds like fun, Ashley," I'd say. "Let's do that soon."

As for Little Vinnie, he was the worst conversationalist in history. All he wanted to do was shake my hand and say, "How ya doin'?" whenever I brought him another White Russian. Other than that, forget it. Eventually, I realized that he was almost entirely dear. It Vinnie couldn't hear me, he'd get frustrated and assume that I was insulting him. He'd burst out, "Aw, shut the hell up! Just shut the hell up and leave me alone!"

Some quiet afternoons, it would just be the three of us in that bar for hours. Ashley the Junkie, Little Vinnie and me. Ashley would eventually fall asleep and knock over her Long Island iced tea. I would clean it up so she wouldn't get it in her hair. I would keep bringing Little Vinnie his White Russians, and he would shake my hand and grin happily every time.

"How ya doin'?"

"Doing great, Vinnie," I'd always say. "I'm doing real good."

There were people who said that the Coyote Ugly Saloon were a dump full of losers, but the words dump and loser are, after all, relative. At the time, for instance, I was subletting a drug addict's apartment, just off Avenue B. When I moved in, there was nothing in the refrigerator but a syringe, and the microwave literally contained a layer of topsoil. I had to take care of the drug addict's three hideous cats, which were about as domesticated as weasels. The whole building smelled like a slaughterhouse. A visiting friend said sympathetically, "Even Henry miller never stayed in a place this gross." Compared with my home, the Coyote Ugly Saloon was a cathedral.

And as far as losers go, I'd just had my heart broken, myself. Everyone has his heartbreak story (and I've heard them all), so I'll keep mine simple: I loved someone, and he moved away. I was inestimably sad. Like a newborn, I would cry myself to sleep and wake up in the middle of the night to cry some more. Who was I to talk about losers? I was happy only when I was swimming long laps at the poor or tending bar at the Coyote Ugly Saloon.

And after a few weeks at the Coyote Ugly, I quit swimming.

Every bar is a monument to talk, which is why very lonely people and very gregarious people need bars. As a bar customer, you can engage in only two conversations, one to your left and one to your right. But as a bartender, I could engage in fourteen conversations at once. I wasn't the prettiest bartender at the Coyote Ugly Saloon, but I was damn sure the best talker. I could bandy with any man and banter with his brother. I was completely awake during that year, especially during the long night shifts. I wasn't the belle of the ball; I was the bouncing ball. You all looked to me.

By one in the morning on a typical night for example, I'm already up on the bar, dancing to an Allman Brothers song on the jukebox. The brothers are signing, "Sometimes I feel like I been tied to the whipping post." I tear off my belt and whip the bar to the beat. Then I whip Redneck Lou (who always volunteers), and I do it in such an ironic way that you, the customer, die laughing.

By two in the morning, I have Reuben on top of the bar with me. He's wearing a Zorro mask I made by ripping off a piece of his T-shirt. He's wearing a cape I made out of a plastic Budweiser banner. I give him one garbage-can lid, and I take another. We hold them like shields. We have a broomstick, and we begin to sword fight. He shouts, "Die! Die!" People come off the street to watch and then stay to drink.

By three in the morning, Spit-Take Phil has found a latex glove and filled it with beer. He pokes holes in the glove's fingers and climbs onto the bar. He gets on all fours and tucks the bloated glove into his belt, so it hangs like an udder. He moos. Naturally, I grab two rubber bands and quickly put my hair in farm-girl pigtails. And then I milk him. The crowd is cheering.

By four in the morning, I start threatening to close. By five I actually start the slow process of throwing everybody out. "Last call!" I say. "Last call for alcohol!"

By six in the morning, I am standing on the bar again. I have turned all the lights on brightly; the jukebox is off. But you, the devoted customer, still won't leave.

"It's motel time," I drone. "I don't care what you do. Just don't do it here."

But you still stay, planted on your bar stools. So I grab a broom, and I step onto the bar with it. I start sweeping your drinks off the bar, with a light little flick and a fake Cinderella smile. The place is a mess anyhow. The bottles roll to the floor and break; the beer spills everywhere. It doesn't matter. It really makes no difference at all.

"Tra-la-la!" I sing. "Please go home now!"

Finally you leave. Before I lock up for the night, I set off a roach bomb in the middle of the floor strong enough to kill a mule train, and then I run out the door before the chemicals hit. Outside the sun has not yet come up, but the sky has a magnificent breaking light. The only cars on First Avenue are the garbage trucks and the newspaper delivery vans. (One particular morning, I rounded the corner at 9th Street and found Tom, the owner of the Village Idiot, draped over a mailbox, snoring. He was drunk and sleeping, with his cheek pressed lovingly against the cool, blue cheek of the United States Postal Service. "Good night, Tommy," I said.)

Back at my apartment, I pull a wad of money from my jeans. My tips. A thick stack of bills, folded like a fat taco. I peel off whatever I am wearing and then face the biggest dilemma of the night: Do I throw my clothes in the laundry? Or just throw them away?

At the Coyote Ugly Saloon, we used to say, "Every good joke begins, 'A man walks into a bar…'"

"You don't have much respect for men, do you?" my brother-in-law asked me at the time of my bartending career. "You're beginning to think we're jokes, aren't you?"

Not true. Not at all true. For instance, a man walked into a bar one night, and two and a half years later, I married him. I met him at the Coyote Ugly Saloon, and it was later at the Coyote Ugly Saloon that he asked me, "Would you marry a man who asked you to marry him after he'd had a few drinks?"

"If I married every man who asked me after a few drinks," I said, "I would have been gone long ago."

But I married him anyway. An easy choice, because he was the nicest one. People think it's an odd way to meet a husband and an odd way to be proposed to, but it makes perfect sense to me. I have always loved a good bar. I come from a gamily of good drinkers. There was one year when my dad was making his own beer, my sister was writing a 300-page doctoral dissertation about women's drinking during Prohibition, my mother was counseling teenage alcoholics and I was bartending. As a family, we orbited the universe of inebriation. Back when I was 7 years old, my grandfather sat me and my sister on his knee and told us, wisely, "Whenever you're in a strange bar and you don't know the bartender, always order a martini. It's pure alcohol, so he can't stuff you on the booze."

When I was 8 years old, that same grandfather took me on a tour of the Matt brewery in Utica, New York. At the end of the tour, the guides led us into a dark turn-of-the-century tavern. The adults each got a free sample of Matt draft beer. I was hoisted up onto a barstool. The bartender slid me over a frosty root beer in a frozen mug, along with a basket of pretzels. The sweet-and-salt taste of that combination was extraordinary. The tavern was carved from dark woods and decorated with a great, smoky mirror. Decadent red velvet drapes kept the sun out. My fingers left prints in the frost on my glass. The low laughter of that tavern is still the most adult sound I can remember.

I planted my elbows on the bar in exactly the manner of my grandfather. I was settling in. I was the prettiest girl in the whole bar.

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